I am not in a place where I can afford a VPN (do not start suggesting cheap VPNs to me istg), and in addition, you have to place a lot of trust in the VPN. Tribler seems promising, except... For the giant disclaimer that's been on the site for years. That worries me. I am quite worried about getting scary letters from my ISP or something when torrenting.
Do not put yourself in danger. Our anonymity is not yet mature.
Tribler does not protect you against spooks and government agencies. We are a torrent client and aim to protect you against lawyer-based attacks and censorship. With help from many volunteers we are continuously evolving and improving.
Edit: Seems like there are a lot of issues below the surface as well... https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/19118584/10120234
And Lokinet, I2P, and GNUnet have their own massive problems... https://comment.ctrl.blog/discussion/tribler-onion-routed-bittorrent
ngl, kinda depressing that it's like this...
Edit 2: I misread the article a bit, it's not quite as dire as I thought it was initially, but the warning and the fact that only the core file-transferring features are anonymized at all... Is a bit disconcerting.
The problem is that content rights holders setup bots that track who is torrenting media that they own (all the peers they can connect to).
Then they use your ip to ask your ISP to stop you.
As far as i am aware (and possibly wrong), magnet links aren't any more secure than using a .torrent file, it's just another form of it that can be easily clicked (or copied) to open in your client (i've never looked but it might just be a link containing the info that would be in the torrent file).